So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.
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So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.
And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.
And so is BlueSky.
BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.
But. It's not decentralized. #BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.
It (allegedly?) uses #ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.
For example, ATP allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.
But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."
Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. It's not motherfucking Xitter. But it's not decentralized.
links:
Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users - Bluesky
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.
Bluesky (bsky.social)
GitHub - did-method-plc/did-method-plc: Public Ledger of Credentials: a cryptographic, strongly-consistent, and recoverable DID method
Public Ledger of Credentials: a cryptographic, strongly-consistent, and recoverable DID method - did-method-plc/did-method-plc
GitHub (github.com)
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Possibly a Dogreplied to Possibly a Dog last edited by
**https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc**
"We originally titled the method "placeholder", because we didn't want it to stick around forever in its current form. We are actively hoping to replace it with or evolve it into something less centralized - likely a permissioned DID consortium. That being said, we do intend to support did:plc in the current form until after any successor is deployed, with a reasonable grace period. We would also provide a migration route to allow continued use of existing did:plc identifiers."
the road to software hell is paved with "actively hoping to replace it"
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Possibly a Dogreplied to Possibly a Dog last edited by
And, they just announced subscriptions. Here comes the rent!
https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l7bifd4rwd2g (direct link to the sub subskeet) has a bunch of cheerleaders replying “take my money”, as if that will forestall the inevitable degradation of service, and as if they weren’t secretly planning this business model shift all along
it’s #enshittification stage 2: charge rent for full functionality, then add ads to the free tier — first for self-promos, then to buy subs for others, then “partners” (advertisers) including crypto scams from their new co-owners, and influencer-hustling pickaxe salesmen
(referring to the real profiteers of the gold rush)
— then add ads to the paid tiers too
(that’s stage 3, right @pluralistic ? it’s hard to keep the stages straight since they’re all happening so quickly these days)
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@possibledog you state this as if mastodon is much better. It’s federated not decentralised. It has a monopoly on the software implementations. The overall Fediverse user base 30% are on the mastodon servers ran by the mastodon nonprofit. It doesn’t offer data nor account portability nor actual ownership unless a user self-hosts. Plenty of servers have shutdown with no warning and left users SOL. The servers all handle everything and are under the ownership of a single person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953551#:~:text=Hacker%20News&text=Is%20Not%20Decentralized-,Mastodon%20is%20not%20decentralized%2C%20it’s%20federated.,t%20actually%20move%20your%20posts
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@summertime oh wow thanks for the link
It’s been a while since i got slashdotted
I love how most of that thread is bickering about the correct definition of “decentralized” —
the [Dictionary Fallacy](https://effectiviology.com/appeal-to-definition/) is such a booby trap for clever passionate people, totally flips a conversation from collaboration into competition and rage
— while ignoring the core fact that #Bluesky is *owned by goblins* who are totally gonna push it down the #enshitification path no matter what its network topology looks like.
(goblin owners including the *actual guy* who fucked up Twitter and then sold it to the second worst person on the planet)
I wish ATProto was a proper old-school open standard, since there’s a lot of cool ideas in it, and some well-intentioned dedicated hobbyists building a community around it, but it’s still mostly a wishful-thinking stalking-horse for a single company and their greedy #utilitopian owners.
I’m gonna have to look at that page more after I get some coffee.
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Possibly a Dogreplied to Possibly a Dog last edited by
Here’s another, better, even deeper dive into how #ATProtocol handwaves at true decentralization while failing to implement it:
jonny (good kind) (@[email protected])
Content warning: long, bsky, atproto, on the impossibility of multiple relays
Neuromatch Social (neuromatch.social)
And here’s a discussion of my top post here (
I’m flattered
️) on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994which actually has some good back-and-forth with some actual #BlueSky devs and others. I think the #BlueSky devs and #ATProtocol hobbyists have some good ideas and good intentions, but they’re also being used and confused by a company that’s owned by assholes and driven by greed.
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Another interesting perspective on whether Bluesky's is decentralized is @rwg's Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse?.
My perspective is that while Bluesky's and AT's approaches to decentralization is different than the Fediverse's instance-oriented approach (or a pure P2P networks) -- and the differences are important -- it's still decentralized in the computer science sense of the term. Yes, it's got power-centralizing tendencies ... but so does ActivityPub: larger instances see more of the conversation so search and hashtags work much better. It's one of the reasons Meta looked at ActivityPub and said "yum"! And it's one of the reasons that Mastodon gGmbH changed the default on the mobile apps and the joinmastodon.org landing page to send people to mastodon.social (which also happens to be owned by Mastodon gGmbH).
The people developing for Bluesky/AT that I talk to aren't particularly naive. In Part 3 of Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space talks about the "implicit feudalism" of Bluesky and AT. There's lots of conversation there (even from Blueksy engineers) about the company as a future hostile actor. It's a tradeoff.
Would you rather be developing for a fast-growing ecosystem that's easier to program against and optimized for scalable flat all-public applications (even knowing the company's likely to be exploitative at some point) -- or an ecosystem that isn't growing, has huge compatibility problems between apps, is challenging to program against, and where key influencers are welcoming Meta's plans to embrace, extend, and exploit? Opinions differ (and there's plenty of good stuff going on in ActivityPub as well) but I can certainly see why there's so much enthusiasm about AT.
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maybe the term “centralize” is too physical a metaphor for this abstract debate, since it implies a radial axis, along which the opposite of central is decentral, but that’s not how social networks work: there are always many centers
(the details of the network topology are important, but ultimately a red herring)
what we’re talking about is *concentration* of control
it’s all about power
who gets to call the shots, for whom, with whose consent, for whose benefit
and power corrupts
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Possibly a Dogreplied to Possibly a Dog last edited by
(fuck, i just realized “concentration” is also a “center” metaphor; i meant it in the chemistry sense, the inverse of dilution, but words are hard, and all words are metaphors, and all metaphors are physical, and the physical world has implicit rules unintended by the analogist, and our poor monkey brains can’t keep it all straight (arg, another physical metaphor, damn it!))
shaka, when the walls fell 🥲
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Yeah, power is currently almost completely centralized in Bluesky and the broader ATmosphere and it's not at all clear that will change over time. The abstract AT architecture is one thing, the actually existing AT network and ecosystem -- with Bluesky PBC running the only full-network Relay, Bluesky PBC running the AppView that's 1000 times bigger than any other AppView and the client that's got 1000 times more users than any other, Bluesky PBC hosting the PDSs and running the PDS registry, Bluesky PBC running the default labeler and the custom Discover feed that new Bluesky accounts get by default, Bluesky PBC controlling the protocol, etc -- is another. In principle any of these could change over time, in practice it's not clear how likely that is ... and it's very unlikely that all of them will change.
Fedi's got similar issues although it plays out differently. Mastodon's embrace-and-extend of ActivityPub (their own client API, their quirky interpretations of the loosely written standard), Mastodon's much bigger budget and press visibility than other microblogging platforms, hosting companies unwillingness to host Mastodon forks, ... hmm I wonder if that's got anything to do with Mastodon's still having by far the user base dominant despite being clearly inferior (from a product perspective) to Glitch, Hometown, Akkoma, and Friendica? Mastodon gGmbH's has the ability to set the default of the Mastodon mobile apps and Mastodon landing page to their own mastodon.social instance, and Mastodon gGmbH's CEO gets to decide the priority of whether or not to make it easy for people to move between instances ... what could possibly go wrong?
Of course even at its peak Mastodon gGmbH was never as dominant in fedi (or even in fedi microblogging) as Bluesky PBC is today. Also Mastodon gGmbH is run much less competently than Bluesky PBC has been so far, so rather than leading to an expanding ecosystem where they can exploit their chokeholds, the power dynamics so far have mostly served to hold back fedi as a whole. It'll be interesting to see how things change with Threads moving in ... Meta's evil but "exploiting power dynamics" is a core competence.
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@possibledog @summertime Everything that is possible in ATProto is also possible in ActivityPub. In fact, ActivityPub is a much more capable protocol. Developers even could use DIDs (real ones, not did:plc) for data portability: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
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smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)replied to Possibly a Dog last edited by
@possibledog which then led to more discussion, which then led to more discussion on HN.. fyi:
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@jdp23 @rwg @possibledog the only reason why BS doesn't have those issues is that it's actually completely centralized (no, I'm not going to play semantic games on this). So no, I will not waste any time coding for the umpteenth corporate trap
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/credible-threat-2/ -
Thanks for tagging me on this. I added a couple of new sections to https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/, one on "Some people in the ActivityPub Fediverse very much do not welcome Bluesky" (I've attached a screenshot from the start of that section) and another on "Are Bluesky and the ATmosphere decentralized?" (which also links to posts from @rwg, @possibledog, @rysiek, @jonny, @Kye, and a couple of people saying that Mastodon isn't decentralized (!)).
A couple suggestions for your article ...
in terms of how many accounts are federating from Threads, @laurenshof estimated at about 50,000
the point about people suggesting changing Bridgy Fed to opt in are ignoring informed consent is a good one. It'd be helpful to also quote Mastodon's perspective that allow-list federation is "contrary to Mastodon’s mission of decentralization"
the point about Mike M's work on nomadic identity is also a good one, although it's also important to highlight that when Bluesky surveyed the landscape in 2020-21, the ActivityPub standard and every ActivityPub implementer other than Mike had ignored this existing work and users' long-stated desire for data portability.
Also, when you talk about how Bridgy Fed is "confusing less knowledgeable people about whether or not BS is part of the Fediverse or not", I'd appreciate you linking to my post to clarify just who you're insulting here -- not just me, but also Marco Rogers, Dr. Matt Lee of Gnu social, and the others in the attached screenshot who see Bluesky as part of today's Fediverse.
